


Relativity

by SteamPowered514



Series: Yugioh Drabble's [1]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: I think I made things sadder then they needed to be?, It should be fine though, Millenium Puzzle, Relativity, Seaon 0-ish, Season 0, Yuugi Might be crazy, maze
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-11
Updated: 2015-02-10
Packaged: 2018-03-11 14:44:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3329924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SteamPowered514/pseuds/SteamPowered514
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A few other kinds of sound broke the silence, growls, hisses, and heavy pounds of hands or feet. </p><p>It was maddening.</p><p>The pain of the sprain eventually became known, a dull throbbing that turned sharp when Jou tired to move. It was not as nearly as intense as some of the pain that the blonde had gone through once before. He took a deep breath and tried to ignore it. </p><p>Maddening.</p><p>The minutes passed.</p><p>Slowly as the heartbeat that calmly ticked on.</p><p>A heartbeat that wasn’t Katsuya’s.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Relativity

# The Beginning

Katsuya rubbed his eyes as everything came into focus. The blonde had been sleeping, and felt like he had just lain down before he woke back up. His drunken father finally had passed out and Katsuya finally was able to clean some of the kitchen before heading off to sleep.

The blonde looked around with confusion, he was on some kind of light colored stone, but the texture was unlike anything the brown-eyed teenager had felt or seen before. Katsuya’s attention was drawn to where he was. The quarter Japanese teen’s eyes were blown wide as the staircase above him. He stood up, and felt dizzy as the whole area around him rearranged itself. It was disorienting, the stairs Katsuya was laying on were twisting around in a circle, and the teen began to walk shakily along the seemingly unsafe stairs. 

The stone twisted into many things, corridors, staircases, strange structures that build themselves upon nothing. Sounds squeaked and thudded and hissed into the stones and the emptiness. The madness that penetrated the air made Katsuya’s mind flicker and shudder at the smallest of changes. The hulking darkness that seeped into anything not touched gently by the flickering orange torchlight seeped into the fold of the blondes clothing. 

The blonde was still wearing his PJ’s, a white tee shirt and red plaid boxers, but somehow he could care less right now, obviously according to the structure of the strange pathways he was dreaming. The staircase straightened out into a pathway with doors all along the sides. Katsuya opened one on a whim, and the swarm of rats that came from the room made the teen squirms and turn heel. 

The rats were huge and with their beady little red eyes Katsuya ran for his life. He opened some more doors, and if they led into a hallway he went through them. One of the more sideways doors held his safety; he slid through the door and shut the old wooden thing. 

The blonde teen sat down in that corridor, beneath a flickering torchlight. The sandy texture of the stone felt strange and weird underneath his skin, but until Jonouchi could figure out how to move about without potentially hurting himself he would remain still. It was like scouting an enemy gangs territory, sat still and just look around. 

The deafening silence was broken by a familiar name. 

“Jou!” Katsuya looked up at the nickname, and found Honda, brown hair sticking up at strange angles and a small body slung over his shoulder. 

“Sup, That Yuugi on your back?” Jonouchi gestured at the sideways and backwards world. Honda nodded gently placed the sleeping Yuugi on the sandy stone. While Honda had actually PJ pants, he still wore a ratty exercise tank, but Yuugi had on a matching ensemble of a dark blue and gold hieroglyphic mix. 

“I found him sleeping on some stairs and I couldn’t leave the little guy alone in this place.” The blonde nodded and looked around again. Why were Yuugi and Honda here? Strange dream.

“What is this place?” Jonouchi asked, looking at a staircase that floated by, Honda snorted. 

“I thought you’d know.” Honda gently shook Yuugi, as if to wake him, but the small boy slept on. The brown haired male sighed as he gave up. “He hasn’t responded to anything I’ve done so far. Its like he’s dead or something” 

Jou looked up sharply at that statement, and then looked at the small boy. Steady breathing. “Goodness, don’t scare me like that Honda.” Honda gave a breathless little snort. 

“Didn’t mean to, sorry.” 

The three of them sat there for a few minutes, watching as the stone shifted around them, moving, creating and filling gaps. It was surreal, unsettling in the darkness that was every. Every few minutes a rumbling sound echoed through a corridor that had shifted into existence. 

Footsteps echoed once, and Honda looked at Jou with confusion before Jou shook his head as a signal not to go. They didn’t know who was in here, and even more important they didn’t know what was in here. Yuugi didn’t move through any of it, he slept on, breathing steady and leaning slumped against the wall. 

The darkness pulsed once, the stone shifting and pulling and swirling. It was strange and the blonde didn’t know who screamed, him or Honda. The floor beneath them crumbled, and the darkness swallowed them whole. The blonde was banged against stonewalls as gravity spun around and around, up down and sideways. Honda fell away from him, a stone door clipping the brown haired teenager in the shoulder and making him spin off into another pathway. The last thing that Jou remembered of that fall was grabbing the small body that was Yuugi and bracing for the fall. 

When Katsuya woke up next to multicolored haired boy, he was awake. Yuugi was curled up with his arms hugging his knees, looking off into the darkness of the corridor. As Jonouchi began to move to pull himself into a sitting position, Yuugi snapped to attention. He placed a hand on the blonds’ arm and shook his head. “I don’t think you should move much, you hit the ground pretty hard.” Yuugi stated softly, his eyes casting a glance over Katsuya. 

“Nah, I’m fine, don-“ a twinge of pain made the taller blonde quite down with a grimace. 

Yuugi smirked, “Told you.” He looked away again, as if keeping watch. “You shouldn’t have cushioned my fall, it hurt you more.” 

Jou frowned, and shuffled upwards using the wall as a help to get him sitting. “Why would you even think that? Of course I helped you Yug!” Jou smiled at the thin teenager. Yuugi’s thin shoulders tensed up, but no other emotion showed on his face. 

Both of them sat, still as pond water, breathing in the flickering torchlight. Jou watched Yuugi carefully, watched as the small ribcage expanded and contracted erratically, it sounded like Yuugi was sick. 

Before the blonde could ask if his small best friend was okay, worried about Yuugi’s health as well as his reaction to the dark, cold corridors, footsteps echoed near them. Yuugi pulled closer into himself, he looked a tad pensive.

The footsteps seemed to go behind them, then above them, then under them? The impossible physics of the place confused Jou, making strange echoy sounds that sometimes sounded like the shadowy laughter. The blonde half American tried to shuffle closer to the multicolored haired teenager, but Yuugi just stood up. His dark blue with golden hieroglyphs pajamas were rumpled and disheveled. 

Yuugi had a dark stain near his lower right ribs, dark liquid seeping into the satin nightshirt. 

Katsuya reached out for the smaller teenager, his mind screaming at him for not noticing, screaming at him for not protecting him.

The pale skinned teenager stood in front of the blonde one, breathing heavily and looking around quickly. Jonouchi reached out to grab the dark blue material of the satin night pants. A hiss of “Yug!” 

The situation wasn’t good, both of them hurt and the one who could physically do any kind of heavy lifting was injured to the point of sitting. The footsteps came closer, a shuffling kind of animal. The deep thudding sound echoing all around the corridors that may or may not have defied the laws of physics seemed to reverberate in their bones.

A huge hulking thing came from the shadows, bristling with a deep inky dripping blackness. It had unblinking pupil blown wide eyes, white sharp tiny pinpricked teeth. It had a thick wet kind of breathing, which grated on anyone ears. It swayed as it moved, shoulders hunched and haunches pulled tight to fit into the narrow sandstone corridors. 

Jou gagged at the smell, putrid burning flesh and hair, and pulled on the dark blue fabric of the satin pajamas. Yuugi stood his ground against the blonds’ insistent pulling. His stance got wider, as if he was planning on fighting the beast that had appeared in this insane maze. 

A flash of darkness, the sound of loud rivers rapids against rocks, and the sharp smell of a cold winter morning; Katsuya’s senses were assaulted by the …whatever it was that was unleashed when the thin teenager flicked his wrist. The gesture could have been mistaken for anything, a nervous tick or dismissal wave. What couldn’t have been mistaken for anything else was the black, blacker than anything the half American had ever seen before, shadows that jumped to attention, almost like a dog obeying its master.

Jou knew the scream came from him this time. 

It was like watching a vicious wild animal fight, the dark shadows ripping and tearing into its prey, while the beast lunged and bit and clawed. Some of its dripping blackness steamed and fizzled when it hit the floor, eroding the stone clean away. Katsuya tried to kick away from the fight, fight or flight instincts kicking in.

The beast fell to the shadows, hissing and falling off into the dark negative space. Yuugi coughed, a wet sound that made Jou wince.

“Sorry.” 

Yuugi fell, collapsing on himself. His knees folding and his torso slumped next to the steep fall off. Jou managed to grab onto the rough string of the golden puzzle that the thinner teenager always wore, but the small brown rope snapped, and the small body fell through into the dark abyss below. 

Jou sat in shock. The frayed braided rope still hanging limply in his hand. 

A golden puzzle sat on the floor, shimmering in the dim light.

“Damn.” 

The blond took a deep breath and grabbed at Yuugi’s treasure, slowly bringing it closer and closer to him so that he could snatch the ancient piece up and keep it safe. 

He was panicking enough to not feel the sprain in his lower back.

The minutes passed, heartbeats signaling the seconds that slipped by. It was maddening, the flickering torchlight popped and crackled erratically. The worn yellowed stone was cold, sapping the heat from anything living. 

The air was heavy and thick, the feeling was akin to small gnats crawling all over just cold enough not to be comfortable skin. It was twitchy and the blond half American didn’t like it. 

The puzzle was a comfort, gleaming gold that caught the light. It had a feeling of warmth to it that Katsuya never really considered the metal hunk of puzzle capable of. The pointed edges weren’t easy to ignore, the sharp metal akin to a knife’s blade, but if you managed to hold the puzzle just right the flat side of the pyramid was a comfort to hold. 

A few other kinds of sound broke the silence, growls, hisses, and heavy pounds of hands or feet. 

It was maddening.

The pain of the sprain eventually became known, a dull throbbing that turned sharp when Jou tired to move. It was not as nearly as intense as some of the pain that the blonde had gone through once before. He took a deep breath and tried to ignore it. 

Maddening.

The minutes passed.

Slowly as the heartbeat that calmly ticked on.

A heartbeat that wasn’t Katsuya’s.

__

Footsteps walked by about thirty minutes into the small tortuous experience that the blonde was experiencing. From behind, then in front, then behind again. 

They passed by, before circling back around, and then they got louder. 

Jou looked up, big brown eyes panicky and scared. A familiar face, taller than Jou by a good couple of centimeters and not looking any worse for the wear, Honda came through a secrete passage in the wall about ten meters down. 

“Honda!” The brunet heard and swung his head around to look at the voice that called his name.

“Jou!” Honda came barreling over; his hand on the wall that existed to make the half corridor. He was smiling, a look of relief washed over his face when he recognized the blonde. “Me and Yuugi have been looking for you!” 

A second of processing was all it took for the quarter Japanese teenager to find something wrong with that statement. 

“Yuugi was with me until he fell over the edge, and he was hurt from the fall we all took together.” Jou questioned what was going on as Honda helped him up, being careful and wary for the injured lower back. 

Honda pulled a face, confusion painted on his brow. “Yuugi was with me during the fall, he woke up a few minutes after we landed.“ The two old friends looked at each other, both questioning the other. 

“Hey! Thank goodness you’re alright!” 

The voice was soft and full of kindness. Yuugi. He had been a second behind, coming just barely around the corner as Honda and Katsuya looked at each other strangely. 

“Yug, who did you fall with. Honda says he fell with you, but I swear…” Jou pulled the golden puzzle had had managed to grab from the falling teen as he turned as best he could to see him. 

“I woke up with Hond-“ Yuugi’s voice paused. Jou got a good look at the shorter male as he fully walked through the hidden passage, examining the right side of the much too skinny torso to see if there was blood.

Just the dotted arrangement of stars on dark blue satin. 

Wait.

Yuugi was staring at the puzzle with a blank expression of shock. He looked at the shimmering golden pyramid and gently touched the worn old rope that looped around his own neck. A worn rope that held a replica of the puzzle in Jou’s hands.

Wait.

“Something is wrong here.” Yuugi frowned, before gently taking the puzzle from his taller friend. He carried it with a kind of reverence someone would give to a small child. Side by side, there were differences between the puzzles, one had its golden sheen dulled by time and wear, rounded softer edges, while the other was sharp and deadly and new.

“Wait.” It finally caught up to the blond. “Honda, what did Yuugi have on his pajama’s when we first picked him up.” Jou looked at the brunet with a kind of passion one reserved for solving a Friday night murder mystery. “Think, back to when we checked to make sure he wasn’t hurt.” 

Honda looked at first like a mix of disbelief and sarcasm, before the memory came back. 

“He wasn’t wearing stars?” 

“He wasn’t wearing stars.” Katsuya looked at the thin teenager walking in front of both him and Honda, watched as a flash of understanding crossed his features. Yuugi gripped the two duplicate puzzles tightly.

The multicolor haired teenager’s back suddenly straightened, he looked back at the two taller males behind him. 

“Oh my god.” Yuugi took off, a rolling stride that Jou protested and Honda yelled at him for. The thinner teen had a determined look of ‘finally’ as he turned around corners with confidence. Jou and Honda didn’t even comment on the fact that the shorter teenager had some kind of prior information on this place. 

The stone corridors seemed much brighter now. 

Yuugi slowed down a tad bit, his anxious energy filling up the space around the three of them. He had a look of epiphany on his face, his slim shoulders popping up and down as he gripped the two puzzles tighter. 

A final turn and the three of them were in an open space, a parlor like area that held no furniture, but still had branching halls. A strange skylight lighted it, and even that held a slightly off glow about it. The open room was where Yuugi finally paused, relaxing into his satisfaction on figuring out whatever mystery that had occurred. 

“Come on out!” Yuugi yelled, his soft voice ringing out into the silence and growls and popping of eternal firewood. 

A beat of silence.

Then a tearing sound, a wet sucking like tearing meat from bone. Blackness reached out and tore at the reality around them, clawing and hissing. It was choleric, snapping at the walls and breaking on contact. 

Yuugi stood proud, a small little smirk on his face, the same smirk that the small teenager wore when he knew he won something. The shadow never touched him; it came close to lashing at his skin but never once hurt him. 

The shadow tried to aim to the two behind Yuugi, but he stood his ground and protected them, interposed between the darkness and his friends. He threw his arms wide in a defiant gesture. The inky blackness jumped away from wherever Yuugi placed himself . 

The blackness only lasted a split second, testing to see if Yuugi would in fact back down from it, before just creeping along the walls, filling in the cracks in between the sandstone. A figure appeared, shuffling from the darkness of the crawling blackness. The inky magic surrounding the new face seemed to be aggrieved at its loss. 

He was different than Yuugi, when you could see them both at once. The one from the darkness had a dark tint to his skin, red undertones that showed he wasn’t Japanese. Yuugi had a slouch that was common among the computer generation, making him appear shorter than the other when they both looked to be the same height. They both had the strange hair coloring; with their blonde bangs -Yuugi had much lighter tips, bleached on a dare in his 7th year of schooling, while the other had a much more natural dirty blonde ones- the red that was so dark it looked black until the ends of the spiked hair. Yuugi let all of his bangs hang around his face, while the darker skinned male pushed some of his bangs into his much coarser hair. 

The other teen comported himself with the air of a patrician, back straight and his eyes unwavering. Yuugi fell back, his eyes cast downwards. The paler teen had a propensity to be wary of people; years of bullying had made him naturally aware of the darker side of people. The both of them exuded the exact opposite auras of the other; it was a strange mix to see.

If they weren’t next to each other they would be twins.

Together they looked like distant half brothers.

“Congratulations, you have solved the puzzle.” His voice was thicker than Yuugi’s, deeper and skewed by an unknown accent. He gestured wide, mock bowing at the three of them. “For a second time.” 

Yuugi smiled, not disconcerted by the mocking. 

“I’ll solve it again for some answers.” Jou and Honda were in awe of the confidence that had finally soaked into Yuugi’s normally passive voice. They both looked like they would be bad at a physical confrontation. Too short and too thin to be much of a challenge to anyone with a basic grasp of fighting, but they would probably good at running, given that Yuugi had demonstrated his skill to move quickly many a time while running away from some of the schools larger students.

If Jou knew anything about Yuugi, and by assuming the other copycat, then both of them had always had a subterfuge, imperturbable in their mindsets. 

Honda looked between the two, not sure who would come out on top of this battle of the wits. The dark one, the copycat flicked his wrist and the dark inky blackness came out in small little modicums. Yuugi didn’t flinch. 

The blackness converged on Jou’s hurt lower back. The blonde yelped, unused to the cold feeling. The darkness didn’t cause pain, no, it just crackled and popped with a strange cold energy. It was like jumping into a carbonated pool.   
The pain vanished though. 

“We’ll go somewhere a tad nicer than here.” The doppelganger turned on his heel, barefoot unlike Yuugi who wore socks. There were minute differences between them both that made Yuugi and the copycats dynamics interesting. 

The paler of the two look-alikes narrowed his lavender eyes, judging the validly of the statement. He cast a glance at the area that the other just helped, made a humming sound that was associated with consideration. 

“Where would this place be?” Yuugi watched as Katsuya tested out the kind of healing that the copycat enacted on him. Honda still was trying to talk the blonde out of doing anything to dangerous with the hurt back; of course, Jou claimed that it didn’t hurt anymore. 

The darker of the two just smirked; he motioned the three of them to follow him. The shadows followed the not-Yuugi, sticking to his skin and not letting go. He seemed not to be bothered by them, acting like they weren’t even there. It was like a pet owner and fur, the fur was all over the place, but the person who owns the pet is so used to it that they didn’t notice. 

It was concerning. 

They walked for a while, turning at random and sometimes the other Yuugi even got confused it seemed. He paused a bit too long or hesitated just a moment longer than he normally did when he spun around a corner.

The four of them made it to a door, it looked a tad different than all of the others that scattered about everywhere. It had vine like veins on it, crawling and pulsating with a dark life. It had a cold air to it, like if you touched it your soul would be ripped from your body. Jou and Honda both tired to pull Yuugi away from it, hands on his shoulders and easing the smaller teen away from it. 

The tanner copycat laughed at their worry. The laugh sounded empty and echoed strangely across the dark abyss around them. 

“Only two people in the world can touch this door, and Yuugi here is one of them.” The doppelganger knocked on the forbidden door, the sound that his thin knuckles made while raping across the uneven surface made the hairs on the back of Katsuya’s neck crawl. 

It sounded like knocking on shattered, broken glass. 

Yuugi cringed away from the noise, and Honda actually took a step back. The other’s smile faded a bit at their reaction, but in its replacement a face of realization came across it. He pushed the door open, a creaking broken sound echoed through a hallway. He moved back, allowing the three teenagers through the unnerving door first. 

Katsuya walked through first, surveying the hallway the door emptied out into, immediately followed by Yuugi, then Honda came through last, watching the copycat until he cleared the threshold. The two bigger teenagers kept the smaller one between them, so that if trouble arises they could keep him from being hurt as best they could.

The tanner other Yuugi didn’t close the uneven vine encrusted door, leaving it wide open.

The hallway they walked into was lighted by unknown means; it was much brighter than the torch-lit physic-defying maze. The thin stone hallway was barley two people wide, not enough space for all of them to fit comfortably, and the stone was a soft grey. The light was blinding considering the transition. There were two doors on the never-ending hallway, one was the uninviting vine coated door they just walked from, and another was a soft light wooden door. The unopened door was smooth wooden grain, something from a vacation lake cabin. 

The look alike looked at Yuugi pointedly, “That is your door, only those you wish may open it.” He moved as far out of Yuugi’s way as he could, almost as if scared of the innocent male. 

Yuugi took a breath, he looked at the unopened wood door, and then back to the sandstone eye of Horus that stared back from the door they came from. His face unreadable

Yuugi pushed open the closed wooden door to a soft light, not the darkness of the maze and not the blinding light of the hallway.

It was a room; soft pastel colors decorated the walls, a large bed pushed to one corner with its sheets haphazardly made. Toys littered the floor in sections; pictures of people and places lined the walls, dressers, and bookshelves. Yuugi walked in, confused at this place. He recognized the pictures on the walls, of both the people and places. He glanced at the toys that were strewn across the floor, the well-loved toys from all over the world. 

“Yug? Is this the all of us?” Jou had walked in, and had begun examining the pictures. It was true; one of the bigger pictures on the walls was a large group shot of his three best friends. Anzu was in the middle, smiling widely, Honda was to the left and Jou was to the right. They all looked so happy, together. 

“Yeah,” he looked at the picture, large and glossy next to a large picture of his family. He turned to see both Jou and Honda looking at it with a mix of happiness and content. “I don’t have a picture of you three together like this though, so I wonder how it came to be.” Yuugi moved on to the picture of his family. The picture of his grandfather playing a card game of some kind, his mother making a meal of some kind, and his father fiddling with international paperwork to work on a dig site in somewhere. Yuugi gripped the two puzzles tighter to himself; his whole life was on display for everyone to see. His likes and memories, thrown about the floors and walls like a bad movie exposition scene. 

It was personal and invasive. 

He panicked, breath coming in faster but never reaching his lungs. 

Jou was looking strangely at an old arcade title, the first he and Yuugi ever played competitively with each other. Honda was quizzically fiddling with a puzzle, the same one he gave to his crush with Yuugi’s help. 

Why couldn’t he breathe? 

The short teenager gasped quietly, hiccupping in the corner. He jumped from friend to friend, watching them examine and poke at something deep inside him. It wasn’t okay.

He gripped the puzzles, both of them, tight enough for them to begin to dig into his pale skin. 

He couldn’t breathe.

A hand on his shoulder made him jump, the golden pyramids in his hands clinked together. The hand was connected with the other copycat, his sharp eyes looked concerned by the fact that Yuugi was having a panic attack. The copycat seemed uncomfortable as well. Hell, the similar teen looked to be even more unsettled by the two. 

He could breathe. 

Yuugi relaxed slightly, calmed by the similar male. 

“I’ll answer your questions if you give me back my necklace.” 

At this Yuugi focused his attention on something other than his friends looking quizzically at pictures of sand, school, and his house. 

“It may be time for you to solve the final piece.”

__

They finally settled down, Yuugi sitting on the bed with the doppelganger, while Jou and Honda sat on some beanbags they had found on the floor stuffed in the corners of the room. Yuugi had given the extra puzzle to the look alike, and he smiled, a small grateful smile, before retying a new knot into the frayed rope and slipping the golden thing over his head. 

“Yuugi gets to ask the first question, as he is the host.” 

Yuugi gripped the pillow that the bed had on it; it was fluffy and full of feathers. His thin ribcage was pressed tight against it. “Who are you?” 

The other smirked; he was leaned against the wall and had his hands in his lap. “I am what you saw in my room. At the risk of sounding cliché, I am, in essence, darkness.” He casually moved his long thin fingers in a simple lazy pattern, and the soft barely there shadows in the room jumped at attention. They hugged all around him, as if they worshiped him. 

Jou jumped back, almost off his beanbag, when his fear of the occult kicked in. Curses and black magic had always been a sore spot for him, heavily believing in superstitions and fortune telling. Honda just gripped his beanbag tighter, jump scare making him move at all.

Yuugi barely even gasped, his eyes widened slightly, but other than that he was amazed. Hell, he had the feeling he’s seen this before. The self-proclaimed darkness snapped his fingers and the shadows slinked away, almost like they felt a pain at being separated from the mysterious teenager. 

“What are you?” Katsuya asked this, his brown eyes looking at that wooden door again with a new reverence. 

“Dead.” The dark leaned foreword, a pout on his face as he braced his elbows on his crisscrossed knees. “At least my body is, because I inhabit this damn thing.” He leaned entirely on his right hand and used his left to pull up the golden puzzle. 

“Th-Then how? How are we talking?” Honda was quick to point out the inconsistencies with the logic, halfway convincing himself and halfway reassuring Jou. “You can’t just ramble off nonsense and expect me to believe you!” 

“You, as a projected consciousness that the puzzle sucked up while you were vulnerable, are talking to me, the puzzle’s lovely trapped soul.” The dead teen leaned back to the wall now, showing what little height he had. “If you noticed, the puzzle keeps it own time, the metronome beat that counted out the seconds. I have an approximate knowledge on how long a human is built to live for, a handful of decades at most.” He had picked up steam now, his shoulders set and his red-violet eyes a harsh gleam. 

“I’ve been trapped here-separated from myself and spread all around every single puzzle piece- for at least four millennia. The only reason I’m whole and talking to anyone is because the puzzle was finally solved.” 

Yuugi gripped the whole puzzle that currently hung from his neck. “I helped you.” 

“Saved me.” The dark’s shoulders stooped downwards, any kind of anger steeping out at Yuugi’s statement. “I can not thank you enough.” 

Honda gasped. “You’re the one who the back alley gangs talk about.” He looked quickly to the blonde half American and slapped him on the arm. “Remember! The gang that used to be our rival gang’s nuisance?” Jou nodded, still looking warily at the darkness that seemed to hang around where the copycat sat. “They were complaining loudly at the store when I went there two or three weeks ago. They talked about a short midget who caused some of their members to be ‘consumed by shadows’.” Honda used air quotes at that last statement. 

“You’re the midget they talked about!” 

The tannest teen frowned and cocked his eyebrow, across his face an expression of disbelief and slight irritation. “Thanks for the quip about the height thing, really think your reassuring.” 

“Yeah, midget is a low blow Honda.” Yuugi cocked his head to the two sitting on the dotted and spiraled covered beanbags. “Don’t even make a joke about it.” 

“I was just quoting!” Honda held up his hands in his defense, looking at Jou for help. Jou made a face and gave a ‘don’t-get-me-into-this-argument’ look. “Sorry about it, I’ll remember next time.” 

“Don’t worry to much about it, it was just a natural thing to reprimand.” The copycat waved his hand dismissively, seemingly not worried about it, but Jou looked worriedly at the wave. The look alike snorted at his worry. “No need to jump, they don’t do anything harmful with just a wave.” 

Honda snorted at his blond friend and Jou playfully kicked at the brunet. Yuugi smiled at their shenanigans. The three teenage boys all for a moment completely felt at ease. 

Yuugi turned to the slim body next to him and thought. It was his turn for a question, Jou and Honda asking in an order that worked well, so he had to make it a good one. “Hey,” Yuugi turned to his doppelganger, trying not to dampen the mood. “Why are you in the puzzle, if you don’t mind me asking?” 

The magical teenage looking male sighed heavily and lovingly held his version of the puzzle in his hands. “Honestly? I don’t remember, after a while in a scattered state of mind a person tends to forget things.” He shrugged. 

“Oh. I’m sorry.” Yuugi’s soft nature was showing through, and immediately felt bad at asking that question. 

“Don’t worry about it, after a few years I stopped caring.” He gave a pensive expression before letting the newer looking pyramid down in his lap. “The thing that matters to me is being whole.” 

“That’s kind of concerning actually.” Honda pointed out, he had trapped Jou’s legs underneath his own. The blond half American was cursing softly as he struggled, but Honda didn’t seem to mind. “Yuugi only completed the puzzle a few months ago, and you said you were how old again? A couple of millennia?” 

The blond stopped struggling and looked sharply at the copycat. “Dude, how bad was it?” He was honestly worried for the little look alike. 

“I got used to it.” The darkness looked to be about to elaborate, but something seemed to get his attention. An invisible, silent kind of warning. Yuugi jumped at it, but Jou and Honda didn’t hear or feel it at all. “Okay then, our time is short, it was nice meeting you all, have fun tomorrow at school.” 

Yuugi was about to ask about it, but before he could even get a word out the dead male jumped off the bed and passed through the doorway into the bright hallway. He bowed deeply at them, not the traditional bow that they taught in Japanese schools, but the deep European one that had died out ages ago. 

The world twisted, a burst of energy that filtered through everyone and within a brief moment the three of the boys woke up.

**Author's Note:**

> First Story! Hope Y'all like!
> 
> Don't know why the formatting is like it is, just getting used to this all.


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